this europe trip has been great - it's such a nice happening when things just fall into place above and beyond my expectations. kicked off the two weeks with some london hang and studio mixdowns (new tracks for the funktioneers are mixed, also keep an eye out for a fresh remix for rob van de wouw's album i produced too), then it was straight to norway for the sildajazz festival... played 3 nights there at the very intimate cafe moody. soweto kinch joined me on sax for the first two nights, vanessa freeman for nights 2 and 3. fantastic vibes all around :) toni kofi opened for two of the nights and smashed it, and the lionel hampton tribute band was also on the festival, so was cool to have the likes of nicholas payton and teodross avery in the audience hanging too.
after norway, it was a quick london one nighter to celebrate my birthday - that was quite some hang, really nice to see london friends and fam to celebrate and see in another year on planet earth! - and it was off again early the next morning to padova, italy. plane mishap #2 of the trip - once again my ill-fated korg radias never turned up... they upgraded me to business class but couldn't get my luggage to the destination with me !?! c'MON british airways. mishap #1 was on the flight from LA to london, and someone is an ipod full of iLL tunes richer now - altho realistically, whoever found it would have probably just deleted it all and been happy with a blank new ipod :( ....
i was in venice italy a few months back playing at a great spot called elefante rosso. on that gig i met tommasso cappellato who played drums for the gig. we hit it off and over the following weeks laid plans to hit studio some time together and see what comes of it. yesterday we made that happen. we hit a studio near padova - tommasso on drums, and marcello allulli on tenor sax + effects pedals joining me on a pretty mental rig - korg ms-10, yamaha cs-15, rhodes, mpc, grand piano...
with no preconceived ideas, tunes or plans we hit 4 sets of straight up improv madness and mayhem. somewhere between jazz and the mpc twist up we explored every corner we could and by the end of the day had about 5 hours of music in the can. i'm not sure what form the music will take in the end, but there's at least a couple of albums worth of material for this new project, and it will definitely see light of day when it's ready :) the whole day was broadcast on ustream.tv as well - thanks for dropping by those who did!
a fantastic day of so much music was capped off with a couple of padova sites - including prato della valle and the tower which was galileo galilei's observatory where he made his biggest astronomical discoveries.. history!
today i'm heading to switzerland for a few days chill and two radio show promos in basel and zurich (thursday for livingroom.fm stadtmusik 107.6 fm and friday for rundfunk.fm), then it's back to london to celebrate phil asher's inspiration information clubnite's 12th birthday at east village - i might even drop a lil keyboard action alongside the fam :) and wrap up the two weeks with studio with bembe segue. <--- she played me some demos the other day that are JAW DROPPING. hopefully people get to share in those some time.
in the meantime, some really exciting things falling into place for the next few months - shows, studio projects... word on all that very soon!